Okay, after losing countless hours of progress in a game due to a corrupted .sav file, I've decided I should start backing up my game saves. I'm running akAIO 1.7.1, which provides a function to backup a .sav file, but it requires me to switch the file view to show .sav files, navigate to a game, and tell it to back up (doing this separately for each game). And I know there are general file managers for the DS that will let me browse files, manually copy them, etc., but again, I'd need to do it for each game.

Is there an app that goes through each of your .sav files, checks the file timestamp against the current .bak file (if there is one), and copies the .sav file to the .bak file if the timestamp on the .sav file is newer?

If there isn't an app like this, it seems like something that could be useful. Just a small, simple app that could be run periodically.

In theory, it should be "simple" for a vaguely experienced coder. Simply find every *.sav file, and copy it to *.bak. However, I have NO experience with coding in C (only a little scripting in AHK) so can't attempt it. Although as tk_saturn says: Its probably best to backup to PC in case memory card fails.

Yeah, I back up to my PC every so often (so I only lost about half my progress on that game, instead of all of it), but it just isn't that often that I get around to pulling the SD card out of my AK2 and putting it in a card reader on my PC. It'd be a lot easier to just run something on the DS, so I'd be inclined to do it more often. And if it checks the timestamps on the files and only copies ones that have been changed, it should only take it a few seconds to run, after the first time.

I actually am an experienced coder (it's what I do for a living), but I've never messed with the DS dev kit. Once I was familiar with all of that, it would probably only take an hour or two to write the app. But I know from experience that setting up the development environment, getting the libraries, SDKs, compilers, etc., and figuring out the API for a platform I've never developed on before always takes a lot longer than I'd like.

Do you think there'd be much interest in such an app from other DS flashcart users?

Yeah, I back up to my PC every so often (so I only lost about half my progress on that game, instead of all of it), but it just isn't that often that I get around to pulling the SD card out of my AK2 and putting it in a card reader on my PC. It'd be a lot easier to just run something on the DS, so I'd be inclined to do it more often. And if it checks the timestamps on the files and only copies ones that have been changed, it should only take it a few seconds to run, after the first time.

I actually am an experienced coder (it's what I do for a living), but I've never messed with the DS dev kit. Once I was familiar with all of that, it would probably only take an hour or two to write the app. But I know from experience that setting up the development environment, getting the libraries, SDKs, compilers, etc., and figuring out the API for a platform I've never developed on before always takes a lot longer than I'd like.

Do you think there'd be much interest in such an app from other DS flashcart users?

Its not too hard to setup the SDK, simply install devkitPro. There are a number of examples with it to help you get to grips with DS programming, and all the necessary libraries (only really necessary library is libfat) are included.

QUOTE(UniqueGeek @ Aug 8 2010, 09:23 PM) The M3i Zero backs up a save every time a game loaded.

best save manager of all can create 8 backups of save files of each game...
That's a nice app, and I think I'll use it for now. But it still doesn't do what I'm looking for (automatically go through and back up all save files that have changed).

QUOTE(Xenon++ @ Aug 8 2010, 08:48 PM) I might make one next week...
BTW ndslink.nds in my mshl2tools should be a good example.

Click to expand...

I'll take a look at mshl2tools. So far, my efforts have been hampered by (a) libfat doesn't work in emulators (though I think I'll get it working with the GBA CF patch thing with DeSmuME), which really slows down the build/test cycle, and (b) the libfatdir example in the devkit doesn't work completely correctly with my AK2 in my DS (it doesn't recognize directories). It'll be good to have a working example.

Unless, of course, you make this thing next week, and I don't need to bother with this...

looks great, but doesnt really works on my ak2i. i got only some weird named .bak files spread in my folders.
also, if any updates planned. a filter option would be nice to exclude some folders. eg the old moonshl 1.71 folder because it trys to backup the bookmark.sav files.

There are 71 .sav files within the Games folder, and one .sav file in the root (as you can see). When I ran savbackup, it showed it going through all of the .sav files, recursively, and saying it was backing them up. Took a little while to run, then said to press A to shut down. I did, and it powered off.

Looking at the SD card afterward, however, there are no new files in the Games folder, and just the two .bak files were created in the root as you can see above (Ga.bak and D.bak). I suspect it was just writing to one or both of those files repeatedly instead of the correctly named destination files when it was copying. It clearly read the directory structure correctly, because I could see it listing all of the .sav files in the Games folder while it ran, claiming to back them up. But it lost something when creating and writing to the destination files, so no .bak files were created in the Games folder.

I grabbed it from your site again, tried it, and it still did the same thing. I just now came back here on a different computer to get the file again to make absolutely sure there was no chance I was getting an old cached version, and I see the files are no longer on your server. I'd be glad to try whatever version you're working on at any time, if you're still working on it.